The city: Its return as a lens for social theory

Saskia SassenDepartment of Sociology and Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University, 713 Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 25 September 2010

a b s t r a c t

The article examines in what ways the sociological study of cities can produce scholarship and analytictools that help us understand the broader social transformations under way today. Urban sociology hadthis capacity early in the 20th century, when industrialization generated massive changes in cities. Thethesis is that today globalization is similarly generating major changes that become visible in cities, mostnotably global cities. One critical issue here is whether these larger transformations evince sufficientlycomplex and multivalent urban instances as to allow us to construct such instances as objects of studythat takes us beyond the urban moment of a process or condition. The urban moment of a major processcan help the empirical study of that process in ways that other phases of such a process might not. At thesame time, this urbanization of major processes repositions the city as an object of study. And this is thesecond question organizing this article: what is it we are actually naming today when we use the con-struct city?

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Introduction

The city has long been a strategic site for the explorationof many major subjects confronting society and sociology.But it has not always been a heuristic space – a space capa-ble of producing knowledge about some of the major trans-formations of an epoch. In the first half of the 20th century,the study of cities was at the heart of sociology. This is evi-dent in the work of Simmel, Weber, Benjamin, Lefebvre,and most prominently the Chicago School, especially Parkand Wirth, both deeply influenced by German sociology.These sociologists confronted massive processes – industri-alization, urbanization, alienation, a new cultural formationthey called ‘‘urbanity.” Studying the city was not simplystudying the urban. It was about studying the major socialprocesses of an era. Since then the study of the city, andwith it urban sociology, gradually lost this privileged roleas a lens for the discipline and as producer of key analyticcategories. There are many reasons for this, most importantamong which are questions of the particular developmentsof method and data in sociology generally. Critical was thefact that the city ceased being the fulcrum for epochaltransformations and hence a strategic site for research aboutnon-urban processes. Urban sociology became increasinglyconcerned with what came to be called ‘‘social problems.”

Today, as we enter a new century, the city is once againemerging as a strategic site for understanding some of themajor new trends reconfiguring the social order. The cityand the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategicsites where major macro-social trends materialize andhence can be constituted as an object of study. Amongthese trends are globalization, the rise of the new informa-tion technologies, the intensifying of transnational andtranslocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence andvoice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity. Each oneof these trends has its own specific conditionalities, con-tents and consequences. The urban moment is but one mo-ment in often complex multi-sited trajectories.

Urban sociology can capture some of these features.Other branches of sociology can use the urban moment toconstruct their object of research even when it is non-ur-ban. Cities are also sites where each of these trends inter-acts with the others in distinct, often complex manners,in a way they do not in just about any other setting. Thisresurgence of the city as a site for research on these majorcontemporary dynamics is also evident in other disciplines.Anthropology, economic geography, cultural studies, andliterary criticism, all have developed an extensive urbanscholarship; most recently, economists are beginningto address the urban and regional economy in theiranalyses in ways that differ from an older tradition of urbaneconomics, one that had lost much of its vigor andpersuasiveness.

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City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 3–11

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All of this raises one of the questions organizing the arti-cle. Can the sociological study of cities produce scholarshipand analytic tools that help us understand the broader so-cial transformations under way today as it once did early inthe preceding century? One critical issue here is whetherthese larger transformations evince sufficiently complexand multivalent urban instantiations as to allow us to con-struct such instantiations as objects of study. The urbanmoment of a major process makes the latter susceptibleto empirical study in ways that other phases of such a pro-cess might not. At the same time, this urbanization, albeit itpartial, of major dynamics repositions the city as an objectof study: what is it we are actually naming today when weuse the construct city? This is the second question organiz-ing this article.

Here I examine these questions of research and theoriza-tion by focusing particularly on globalization, the rise of thenew information technologies, the intensifying of transna-tional and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening pres-ence and voice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity.All of these are at a cutting edge of actual change that socialtheory needs to factor in to a far greater extent than it has.By far the best developed conceptually and empirically issocio-cultural diversity. Thus as regards this subject I willconfine my treatment here to those issues of socio-culturaldiversity that are bound up with the other major trends Iam focusing. There is a strong emerging new literature onthe other three trends, but mostly in disciplines other thansociology and, specifically, urban sociology.

These trends do not encompass the majority of socialconditions; on the contrary, most social reality probablycorresponds to older continuing and familiar trends. Thatis why much of sociology’s traditions and well establishedsubfields will remain important and constitute the heart ofthe discipline. Further, there are good reasons why most ofurban sociology has not quite engaged the characteristicsand the consequences of these three trends as they instan-tiate in the city: current urban data sets are quite inade-quate for addressing these major trends at the level of thecity. Yet, although these three trends may involve onlyparts of the urban condition and cannot be confined tothe urban, they are strategic in that they mark the urbancondition in novel ways and make it, in turn, a key researchsite for major trends.

Conceptual elements

Among today’s dominant forces reconfiguring the social,the economic, the political, and the subjective are global-ization and the new information technologies. Globaliza-tion and telecommunications have enabled a proliferationof transnational and translocal networks that cut acrossthe boundaries of cities and states – that is to say, acrossthe boundaries of major sociological framings and datasets. The traditional tools of sociology and social theory,let alone urban sociology can accommodate only some as-pects of these trends.

The exception is an early generation of sociologists inwhat is today a still small but rapidly growing scholarshipthat has explicitly sought to theorize these new conditionsand to specify them empirically (among the earlier begin-nings of this scholarship see e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1999;

Castells, 1989; Chase-Dunn, 1984; Gottdiener, 1985; King,1990; Lash & Urry, 1994; Rodriguez & Feagin, 1986; Zukin,1991, to cite but a few). Economic geography (e.g. Knox &Taylor, 1995; Short & Kim, 1999) and cultural studies (e.g.Bridges & Watson, 2010; Palumbo-Liu, 1999) also saw anearly generation of key contributions.

A number of social theorists (e.g. Giddens, 1990; Taylor,1997; Beck, 2005; Brenner, 1998) have examined the‘‘embedded statism” that has marked the social sciencesgenerally and become one obstacle to a full theorizationof some of these issues. At the heart of embedded statismis the explicit or implicit assumption that the nation-stateis the container of social processes. To this I would addtwo further features: the implied correspondence of na-tional territory with the national, and the associated impli-cation that the national and the non-national are twomutually exclusive conditions.

These various assumptions work well for many of thesubjects studied in the social sciences. But they are nothelpful in elucidating a growing number of situations whenit comes to globalization and to a whole variety of transna-tional processes now being studied by social scientists. Norare those assumptions helpful for developing the requisiteresearch techniques. Further, while they describe condi-tions that have held for a long time – throughout much ofthe history of the modern state since WWI and in somecases even earlier – we are now seeing their partial unbun-dling.1 For instance, I find (Sassen, 2007, 2008: chaps. 1, 5and 6) that one of the features of the current phase of glob-alization is that the fact a process happens within the terri-tory of a sovereign state does not necessarily mean it is anational process. Conversely, the national (e.g. firms, capital,cultures) may increasingly be located outside national terri-tory, for instance, in a foreign country or in digital spaces.This localization of the global, or of the non-national, in na-tional territories, and the localization of the national outsidenational territories, undermines a key duality runningthrough many of the methods and conceptual frameworksprevalent in the social sciences – that the national and thenon-national are mutually exclusive.

This partial unbundling of the national has significantimplications for our analysis and theorization of major so-cial transformations such as globalization and the possibil-ity of focusing on the city to get at some of their criticalempirical features. And it has significant implications forthe city as an object of study. The city has long been adebatable construct, whether in early writings (Castells,1972; Harvey, 1973; Lefebvre, 1974; Timberlake, 1985) orin recent ones (Brenner, 2004; Global Networks, 2010;Lloyd, 2005; Paddison, 2001). The unbundling of nationalspace and of the traditional hierarchies of scale centeredon the national, with the city nested somewhere between

1 There have been many epochs when territories were subject to multiple, or atleast more than one, system of rule (Sassen, 2008: Part One). In this regard the currentcondition we see developing with globalization is probably by far the more commonone and the period from World War I – when we saw the gradual institutionaltightening of the national state’s exclusive authority over its territory – the historicalexception. However, the categories for analysis, research techniques and data sets inthe social sciences have largely been developed in that particular period. Thus we facethe difficult and collective task of developing the theoretical and empirical specifi-cations that allow us to accommodate the fact of multiple relations between territoryand institutional encasement, rather than the singular one of national state andsovereign rule.

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the local and the region, raises the ante in terms of priorconceptualizations. Major cities have historically beennodes where a variety of processes intersect in particularlypronounced concentrations. In the context of globalization,many of these processes are operating at a global scale cut-ting across historical borders, with the added complexitiesthat brings with it. Cities emerge as one territorial or scalarmoment in a trans-urban dynamic.2 This is however, not thecity as a bounded unit, but the city as a complex structurethat can articulate a variety of cross-boundary processesand reconstitute them as a partly urban condition (Sassen,2001). Further, this type of city cannot be located simplyin a scalar hierarchy that puts it beneath the national, re-gional and global. It is one of the spaces of the global, andit engages the global directly, often by-passing the national.Some cities may have had this capacity long before the cur-rent era; but today these conditions have been multipliedand amplified to the point that they can be read as contrib-uting to a qualitatively different urban era. Pivoting theori-zation and research on the city is one way of cutting acrossembedded statism and recovering the rescaling of spatialhierarchies under way.

Besides the challenge of overcoming embedded statism,there is the challenge of recovering place in the context ofglobalization, telecommunications, and the proliferationof transnational and translocal dynamics. It is perhapsone of the ironies at the start of a new century that someof the old questions of the early Chicago School of UrbanSociology should re-surface as promising and strategic tounderstand certain critical issues today. One might ask iftheir methods might be of particular use in recoveringthe category place (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1967; seealso Duncan, 1959) at a time when dominant forces suchas globalization and telecommunications seem to signalthat place and the details of the local no longer matter.Robert Park and the Chicago School conceived of ‘‘naturalareas” as geographic areas determined by unplanned,subcultural forces. This was an urban sociology that usedfieldwork within a framework of human ecology andcontributed many rich studies mapping detailed distribu-tions and assuming functional complementarity amongthe diverse ‘‘natural areas” they identified in Chicago.3

Yet the old categories are not enough. Some of the majorconditions in cities today, including the urban moment ofnon-urban dynamics, challenge mainstream forms of theo-rization and urban empirical analysis. Fieldwork is a neces-sary step in capturing many of the new aspects in the urbancondition, including those having to do with the majortrends focused on in this chapter. But assuming comple-mentarity or functionalism brings us back to the notion ofthe city as a bounded space rather than one site, albeit astrategic one, where multiple trans-boundary processesintersect and produce distinct socio-spatial formations.Recovering place can only partly be met through the re-

search techniques of the old Chicago School of Urban Soci-ology (see e.g. the debate in Cities and Communities vol.1(1) 2001 and in Urban Geography, 2008). I do think weneed to go back to some of the depth of engagement withurban areas that the School represented and the effort to-wards detailed mappings. The type of ethnographies doneby Duneier (1999) or the scholars in Burawoy and et al.(1991), or the type of spatial analysis developed by Harvey(2007) and the authors in Global Networks (2010) areexcellent examples, using many of the techniques yetworking within a different set of framing assumptions.

But that is only part of the challenge of recovering place.Large cities around the world are the terrain where a multi-plicity of globalization processes assume concrete, localizedforms. These localized forms are, in good part, what global-ization is about. Recovering place means recovering themultiplicity of presences in this landscape. The large cityof today has emerged as a strategic site for a whole rangeof new types of operations – political, economic, ‘‘cultural,”subjective (Abu-Lughod, 1994; Bartlett, 2007; Bridges &Watson, 2010; Bryson & Daniels, 2005; Dawson, 1999;Drainville, 2004; Thrift & Amin, 2002; Valle & Torres,2000; Sampson & Raudenbush, 2001). It is one of the nexiwhere the formation of new claims materializes and as-sumes concrete forms. The loss of power at the national levelproduces the possibility for new forms of power and politicsat the subnational level. Further, insofar as the national ascontainer of social process and power is cracked (e.g. Beck,2000; Lustiger-Thaler, 2004; Parsa & Keivani, 2002; Taylor,1995) it opens up possibilities for a geography of politicsthat links subnational spaces across borders. Cities are fore-most in this new geography. One question this engenders ishow and whether we are seeing the formation of a new typeof transnational politics that localizes in these cities.

Immigration, for instance, is one major process throughwhich a new transnational political economy is being con-stituted both at the macro level of global labor markets andat the microlevel of translocal household survival strate-gies. It is one largely embedded in major cities insofar asmost immigrants, certainly in the developed world,whether in the US, Japan or Western Europe, are concen-trated in major cities (Boyd, 1989; Castles & Miller, 2003;Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003; Mahler, 1995). It is, accordingto some scholars (Castles & Miller, 2003; Chinchilla & Ham-ilton, 2001; Cordero-Guzman, Smith, & Grosfoguel, 2001;Espinoza, 1999; Farrer, 2007; Sassen, 2007: chap. 6: PartOne; Skeldon, 1997), one of the constitutive processes ofglobalization today, even though not recognized or repre-sented as such in mainstream accounts of the global econ-omy. The city is one of the key sites for the empirical studyof these transnational flows and household strategies.

Global capital and the new immigrant workforce are twomajor instances of transnationalized actors with featuresthat constitute each as a somewhat unitary actor overrid-ing borders while at the same time in contestation witheach other inside cities (Bartlett, 2007; Sassen, 1988: chap.1). Researching and theorizing these issues will require ap-proaches that diverge from the more traditional studies ofpolitical elites, local party politics, neighborhood associa-tions, immigrant communities, and others, through whichthe political landscape of cities and metropolitan regionshas been conceptualized in sociology.

2 I have theorized this in terms of the network of global cities, where the latter arepartly a function of that network. For example, the growth of the financial centers inNew York or London is fed by what flows through the worldwide network of financialcenters given deregulation of national economies. The cities at the top of this globalhierarchy concentrate the capacities to maximize their capture of the proceeds so tospeak.

3 We can see this in early works such as The Taxi Dance Hall and The Gold Coastand the Slum and later in e.g. Suttles (1968).

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In the next three sections I focus on some of these issuesin greater detail.

The city as a site for research about the globalinformation economy

The concept of the city is complex, imprecise, andcharged with specific historical meanings (e.g. Castells,1972; Hall, 1966; Harvey, 1985; Kresl & Ni, 2010; Lloyd,2005; Park et al., 1967). A more abstract category mightbe centrality, one of the properties constitutive of cities,and, in turn, one they have historically provided and pro-duced. Historically centrality has largely been embeddedin the central city. One of the changes brought about bythe new conditions is the reconfiguring of centrality: thecentral city is today but one form of centrality. Importantemerging spaces for the constitution of centrality rangefrom the new transnational networks of cities to electronicspace (Castells, 1996; Ernst, 2005; Graham & Marvin, 1996;Parnreiter, 2002).

A focus on centrality does not necessarily address mat-ters such as the boundaries of cities or what cities actuallyare. These are partly empirical questions (each city is goingto have a different configuration of boundaries and con-tents) and theoretical ones (is a city necessarily a civitas,is any large urban agglomeration a city). The question is,rather, what are the conditions for the continuity of cen-trality in advanced economic systems in the face of majornew organizational forms and technologies that maximizethe possibility for geographic dispersal at the regional, na-tional and indeed, global scale, and simultaneous systemintegration?

A second major issue for thinking about the city as a sitefor researching non-urban dynamics concerns the narra-tives we have constructed about the city and its relationto the global economy and to the new technologies.4 Theunderstandings and the categories that dominate main-stream discussions about the future of advanced economiesimply the city has become obsolete for leading economicsectors. We need to subject these notions to critical exami-nation. There are at least two sets of issues that need to beteased out if we are to understand the role if any of citiesin a global information economy, and hence the capacity ofurban research to produce knowledge about that economy.One of these concerns the extent to which these new typesof electronic formations, such as electronic financial markets,are indeed disembedded from social contexts. The second setof issues concerns possible instantiations of the global econ-omy and of the new technologies that have not been recog-nized as such or are contested representations. I haveaddressed these issues at greater length elsewhere (2010)and return to them only briefly in the last two sections ofthis chapter.

Finally, and on a somewhat more theorized level, thereare certain properties of power that make cities strategic.Power needs to be historicized to overcome the abstrac-tions of the concept. Power is not simply an attribute or asort of factor endowment. It is actively produced and repro-duced. Many of the studies in urban sociology focused on

the local dimensions of power (e.g. Clark & Hoffman-Marti-not, 1998; Domhoff, 1991; Logan & Molotch, 1987) havemade important contributions in this regard. Beyond thistype of approach, one of the aspects today in the produc-tion of power structures has to do with new forms of eco-nomic power and the re-location of certain forms ofpower from the state to the market, partly due to deregula-tion and privatisation. In the case of cities, this brings withit also questions about the built environment and the archi-tectures of centrality that represent different types ofpower. Cities have long been places for the spatializationof power. More generally, we might ask whether powerhas spatial correlates, or a spatial moment? In terms ofthe economy this question could be operationalized moreconcretely: Can the current economic system, with itsstrong tendencies towards concentration in ownershipand control, have a space economy that lacks points ofphysical concentration? It is hard to think about a discourseon the future of cities that would not include this dimen-sion of power.

To some extent, it is the major cities in the highly devel-oped world which most clearly display the processes dis-cussed here, or best lend themselves to the heuristicsdeployed. However, increasingly these processes are pres-ent in cities in developing countries as well (Amen, Kevin,& Martin Bosman, 2006; Cohen, Ruble, Tulchin, & Garland,1996; Gugler, 2004; Knox & Taylor, 1995; Santos, De Souze,& Silveira, 1994). Their lesser visibility is often due to thefact they are submerged in the megacity syndrome. Sheerpopulation size and urban sprawl create their own ordersof magnitude (e.g. Dogan & Kasarda, 1988; Gugler, 2004);and while they may not much alter the power equation Idescribe, they do change the weight, and the legibility, ofsome of these properties (e.g. Bridges & Watson, 2010; Co-hen et al., 1996; Marcuse & van Kempen, 2000).

One way of framing the issue of centrality is by focusingon larger dynamics rather than beginning with the city assuch. For instance, we could note that the geography ofglobalization contains both a dynamic of dispersal and ofcentralization, the latter a condition that has only recentlybeen recognized in macro-level globalization studies. Mostof the latter has focused on dispersal patterns. The massivetrends towards the spatial dispersal of economic activitiesat the metropolitan, national and global level which weassociate with globalization have contributed to a demandfor new forms of territorial centralization of top-level man-agement and control operations (Sassen, 2001: Parts Oneand Two). The fact, for instance, that firms worldwidenow have well over half a million affiliates outside theirhome countries signals that the sheer number of dispersedfactories and service outlets that are part of a firm’s inte-grated operation creates massive new needs for centralcoordination and servicing. In brief, the spatial dispersalof economic activity made possible by globalization andtelecommunications contributes to an expansion of centralfunctions if this dispersal is to take place under the contin-uing concentration in control, ownership and profit appro-priation that characterizes the current economic system.

It is at this point that the city enters the discourse. Citiesregain strategic importance because they are favored sitesfor the production of these central functions. National andglobal markets as well as globally integrated organizations

4 For an explanation of issues concerning narratives in this domain (see, forinstance, Holston, 1996; Sandercock 2003).

6 S. Sassen / City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 3–11

require central places where the work of globalization getsdone. Finance and advanced corporate services are indus-tries producing the organizational commodities necessaryfor the implementation and management of global eco-nomic systems. Cities are preferred sites for the productionof these services, particularly the most innovative, specula-tive, internationalized service sectors.5 Further, leadingfirms in information industries require a vast physical infra-structure containing strategic nodes with hyperconcentra-tion of facilities; we need to distinguish between thecapacity for global transmission/communication and thematerial conditions that make this possible. Finally, eventhe most advanced information industries have a productionprocess that is at least partly place-bound because of thecombination of resources it requires even when the outputsare hypermobile; the tendency in the specialized literaturehas been to study these advanced information industries interms of their hypermobile outputs rather than the actualwork processes which include top level professionals as wellas clerical and manual service workers.

When we start by examining the broader dynamics inorder to detect their localization patterns, we can beginto observe and conceptualize the formation, at least incip-ient, of transnational urban systems. The growth of globalmarkets for finance and specialized services, the need fortransnational servicing networks due to sharp increasesin international investment, the reduced role of the govern-ment in the regulation of international economic activityand the corresponding ascendance of other institutionalarenas with a strong urban connection – all these point tothe existence of a series of transnational networks of cities.These are of many different kinds and types. Business net-works are probably the most developed given the growth ofa global economy. But we also see a proliferation of social,cultural, professional, and political networks connectingparticular sets of cities.

To a large extent the major business centers in the worldtoday draw their importance from these transnational net-works. There is no such entity as a single global city – andin this sense there is a sharp contrast with the erstwhilecapitals of empires.6 These networks of major internationalbusiness centers constitute new geographies of centrality.The most powerful of these new geographies of centralityat the global level binds the major international financialand business centers: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frank-furt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong,among others. But this geography now also includes citiessuch as Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, MexicoCity. The intensity of transactions among these cities, partic-ularly through the financial markets, trade in services, andinvestment has increased sharply, and so have the ordersof magnitude involved. There has been a sharpening inequal-ity in the concentration of strategic resources and activitiesbetween each of these cities and others in the same country.

This has consequences for the role of urban systems in na-tional territorial integration. Although the latter has neverquite been what its model signals, the last decade has seena further acceleration in the fragmentation of national terri-tory. National urban systems are being partly unbundled astheir major cities become part of a new or strengthenedtransnational urban system.

But we can no longer think of centers for internationalbusiness and finance simply in terms of the corporate tow-ers and corporate culture at their center. The internationalcharacter of major cities lies not only in their telecommuni-cation infrastructure and foreign firms: it lies also in themany different cultural environments in which these work-ers and others exist. This is one arena where we have seenthe growth of an enormously rich scholarship (Bridges &Watson, 2010; King, 1990; Krause & Petro, 2003; Lloyd,2005; Sennett, 2008; Zukin, 1991). Today’s major citiesare in part the spaces of post-colonialism and indeed con-tain conditions for the formation of a postcolonialist dis-course. This is likely to become an integral part of thefuture of such cities.

A new transnational political geography

The incorporation of cities into a new cross-border geog-raphy of centrality also signals the emergence of a parallelpolitical geography. Major cities have emerged as a strate-gic site not only for global capital, but also for the transna-tionalization of labor and the formation of translocalcommunities and identities or subjectivities. In this regardcities are a site for new types of political operations. Thecentrality of place in a context of global processes makespossible a transnational economic and political openingfor the formation of new claims and hence for the constitu-tion of entitlements, notably rights to place. At the limit,this could be an opening for new forms of ‘‘citizenship”(e.g. Bartlett, 2007; Holston, 1996; Torres, Miron, & Inda,1999). The emphasis on the transnational and hypermobilecharacter of capital has contributed to a sense of power-lessness among local actors, a sense of the futility of resis-tance. But an analysis that emphasizes place suggests thatthe new global grid of strategic sites is a terrain for politicsand engagement (Abu-Lughod, 1994; Bridges & Watson,2010; King, 1996; Sandercock, 2003).

This is a space that is both place-centered in that it isembedded in particular and strategic locations; and it istransterritorial because it connects sites that are not geo-graphically proximate yet are intensely connected to eachother through various networks. Is there a transnationalpolitics embedded in the centrality of place and in thenew geography of strategic places, such as is for instancethe new worldwide grid of global cities? This is a geogra-phy that cuts across national borders and the old North–South divide. But it does so along bounded vectors. It is aset of specific and partial rather than all-encompassingdynamics. It is not only the transmigration of capital thattakes place in this global grid, but also that of people, bothrich, i.e. the new transnational professional workforce, andpoor, i.e. most migrant workers; and it is a space for thetransmigration of cultural forms, the reterritorialization of‘‘local” subcultures.

5 For instance, only a small share of Fortune 500 firms, which are mostly largeindustrial firms, have their headquarters in NYC, but over 40% of firms who earn overhalf of their revenues from overseas are located in NYC. Furthermore, even largeindustrial firms tend to have certain specialized headquarter functions in NYC. ThusDetroit-based GM, and many other such firms, has its headquarters for finance andpublic relations in Manhattan.

6 The data are still inadequate; one of the most promising data sets at this time isthat organized by Taylor and his colleagues (GaWC; Taylor, 2004) and the type of dataelaborated by Beckfield and Arthur (2006). But much remains to be done in this field.

S. Sassen / City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 3–11 7

If we consider that large cities concentrate both theleading sectors of global capital and a growing share of dis-advantaged populations – immigrants, many of the disad-vantaged women, people of color generally, and, in themegacities of developing countries, masses of shantydwellers – then we can see that cities have become a stra-tegic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradic-tions (Allen, Massey, & Pryke, 1999; Fainstein & Judd,1999; Gugler, 2004; Massey & Denton, 1993; Nashashibi,2007; Sandercock, 2003). We can then think of cities alsoas one of the sites for the contradictions of the globalizationof capital, even though, heeding Katznelson’s (1992) obser-vation, the city cannot be reduced to this dynamic.

One way of thinking about the political implications ofthis strategic transnational space anchored in cities is interms of the formation of new claims on that space. Thecity has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by globalcapital which uses the city as an ‘‘organizational commod-ity”, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban popula-tion, frequently as internationalized a presence in largecities as capital. The ‘‘de-nationalizing” of urban spaceand the formation of new claims by transnational actors,raise the question Whose city is it?

Foreign firms and international business people haveincreasingly been entitled to do business in whatever coun-try and city they chose – entitled by new legal regimes, bythe new economic culture, and through progressive dereg-ulation of national economies (Sassen, 1996: chaps. 1 and2; 2008: chap. 5). They are among the new city users. Thenew city users have made an often immense claim on thecity and have reconstituted strategic spaces of the city intheir image. Their claim to the city is rarely contested, eventhough the costs and benefits to cities have barely beenexamined. They have profoundly marked the urban land-scape. For Martinotti (1993), they contribute to changethe social morphology of the city; the new city of these cityusers is a fragile one, whose survival and successes are cen-tered on an economy of high productivity, advanced tech-nologies, intensified exchanges (Martinotti, 1993). It is acity whose space consists of airports, top level business dis-tricts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, in brief, a sortof urban glamour zone.

Perhaps at the other extreme, are those who use urbanpolitical violence to make their claims on the city, claimsthat lack the de facto legitimacy enjoyed by the new ‘‘cityusers.” These are claims made by actors struggling for rec-ognition, entitlement, claiming their rights to the city(Body-Gendrot, 1999; Drainville, 2004; Fainstein, 1993;Hagedorn, 2007; Sandercock, 2003; Wacquant, 1997;Wright, 1997). These claims have, of course, a long history;every new epoch brings specific conditions to the mannerin which the claims are made. The growing weight of‘‘delinquency” (e.g. smashing cars and shopwindows; rob-bing and burning stores) in some of these uprisings overthe last decade in major cities of the developed world isperhaps an indication of the sharpened socio-economicinequality – the distance, as seen and as lived, betweenthe urban glamour zone and the urban war zone. The ex-treme visibility of the difference is likely to contribute tofurther brutalization of the conflict: the indifference andgreed of the new elites versus the hopelessness and rageof the poor.

There are two aspects in this formation of new claimsthat have implications for the transnational politics thatare increasingly being played out in major cities. One isthe sharp and perhaps sharpening differences in the repre-sentation of claims by different sectors, notably interna-tional business and the vast population of low income‘‘others” immigrants, women, people of color generally.The second aspect is the increasingly transnational elementin both types of claims and claimants. It signals a politics ofcontestation embedded in specific places but transnationalin character. One challenge for urban sociology is how tocapture such a cross-border dynamic with existing or newcategories and, in doing so, how not to lose the city as a site.

Cities and political subjectivity

This chapter started with a consideration of the ChicagoSchool of Urban Sociology and its possible contribution tosome of the challenges current developments pose for ur-ban theory. This concluding section of the chapter goesback to Weber’s The City in order to examine the produc-tion of political subjectivity signaled by the precedingsection.

In his effort to specify the ideal-typical features of whatconstitutes the city, Weber sought out a certain type of city –most prominently the cities of the late middle ages ratherthan the modern industrial cities of his time. Weber soughta kind of city which combined conditions and dynamics thatforced its residents and leaders into creative and innovativeresponses/adaptations. Further, he posited that thesechanges produced in the context of the city signaled trans-formations that went beyond the city and could instituteoften fundamental transformations. In that regard the cityoffered the possibility of understanding far reaching changesthat could – under certain conditions – eventually encom-pass society at large.

There are two aspects of Weber’s The City that are ofparticular importance here. Weber helps us understand un-der what conditions cities can be positive and creativeinfluences on peoples’ lives (Isin, 2000; Sassen, 2008: chap.6). For Weber cities are a set of social structures thatencourage individuality and innovation and hence are aninstrument of historical change. There is, in this intellectualproject a deep sense of the historicity of these conditions.Modern urban life did not correspond to this positive andcreative power of cities; Weber saw modern cities as dom-inated by large factories and office bureaucracies. My ownreading of the Fordist city corresponds in many ways toWeber’s in the sense that the strategic scale under Fordismis the national scale and cities lose significance. It is thelarge Fordist factory and the mines which emerge as keysites for the political work of the disadvantaged and thosewithout or with only limited power.

Struggles around political, economic, legal, cultural, is-sues centered in the realities of cities can become the cata-lysts for new trans-urban developments in all theseinstitutional domains – markets, participatory governance,rights for members of the urban community regardless oflineage, judicial recourse, cultures of engagement anddeliberation. For Weber, it is particularly the cities of thelate Middle Ages that combine the conditions that pushedurban residents, merchants, artisans and leaders to address

8 S. Sassen / City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 3–11

them and deal with them. These transformations couldmake for epochal change beyond the city itself: Webershows us how in many of these cities these struggles ledto the creation of the elements of what we could call gov-ernance systems and citizenship.

The particular analytic element I want to extricate fromthis aspect of Weber’s understanding and theorization ofthe city is the historicity of those conditions that make cit-ies strategic sites for the enactment of important transfor-mations in multiple institutional domains. Today a certaintype of city – the global city – has emerged as a strategicsite for innovations and transformations in multiple insti-tutional domains. Several of the key components of eco-nomic globalization and digitization instantiate in thistype of city and produce dislocations and destabilizationsof existing institutional orders and legal/regulatory/norma-tive frames for handling urban conditions. It is the high le-vel of concentration of these new dynamics in these citieswhich forces creative responses and innovations. There is,most probably, a threshold effect at work here.

The historicity of this process rests in the fact that underKeynesian policies, particularly the Fordist contract, and thedominance of mass manufacturing as the organizing eco-nomic dynamic, cities had lost strategic functions and werenot the site for creative institutional innovations. The stra-tegic sites were the large factory at the heart of the largerprocess of mass manufacturing and mass consumption,and the national government where regulatory frameworkswere developed and the Fordist contract instituted. The fac-tory and the government were the strategic sites where thecrucial dynamics producing the major institutional innova-tions of the epoch were located. With globalization and dig-itization – and all the specific elements they entail – globalcities emerge as such strategic sites. While the strategictransformations are sharply concentrated in global cities,many are also enacted (besides being diffused) in cities atlower orders of national urban hierarchies.7

A second analytic element I want to extricate from We-ber’s The City is the particular type of embeddedness of thetransformations he describes and renders as ideal-typicalfeatures. This is not an embeddedness in what we mightthink of as deep structures because the latter are preciselythe ones that are being dislocated or changed and are cre-ating openings for new fundamental arrangements toemerge. The embeddedness is, rather, in very specific con-ditions, opportunities, constraints, needs, interactions, con-testations, interests. The aspect that matters here is thecomplexity, detail and social thickness of the particularconditions and the dynamics he identifies as enablingchange and innovation. This complexity and thickness alsoproduces ambiguities in the meaning of the changes and inno-vations. It is not always clear whether they are positive –where we might interpret positive as meaning the creationor strengthening of some element, even if very partial orminor, of participatory democracy in the city – and in whattime frame their positiveness would become evident. Inthose cities of the late Middle Ages he saw as being whatthe city is about, he finds contradictory and multi-valent

innovations. He dissects these innovations to understandwhat they can produce or launch.

The argument I derive from this particular type ofembeddedness of change and innovation is that currentconditions in global cities are creating not only new struc-turations of power but also operational and rhetoricalopenings for new types of political actors which may havebeen submerged, invisible or without voice. A key elementof the argument here is that the localization of strategiccomponents of globalization in these cities means thatthe disadvantaged can engage the new forms of globalizedcorporate power, and secondly that the growing numbersand diversity of the disadvantaged in these cities underthese conditions assumes a distinctive ‘‘presence.” This en-tails a distinction between powerlessness and invisibility/impotence. The disadvantaged in global cities can gain‘‘presence” in their engagement with power but also vis avis each other. This is different from the 1950s to 1970speriod in the US, for instance, when white flight and thesignificant departure of major corporate headquarters leftcities hollowed out and the disadvantaged in a conditionof abandonment. Today, the localization of the globalcreates a set of objective conditions of engagement, e.g.the struggles against gentrification which encroaches onminority and disadvantaged neighborhoods and led togrowing numbers of homeless beginning in the 1980s andthe struggles for the rights of the homeless, or demonstra-tions against police brutalizing minority people. Thesestruggles are different from the ghetto uprisings of the1960s which were short, intense eruptions confined tothe ghettos and causing most of the damage in the neigh-borhoods of the disadvantaged themselves. In these ghettouprisings there was no engagement with power.

An important element is Weber’s emphasis on certaintypes of innovation and change: the construction of rulesand norms precisely because deeper arrangements onwhich norms had been conditioned are being destabilized.8

Herein also lie openings for new political actors toemerge, as well as changes in the role or locus of oldernorms, political actors and forms of authority. This is ahighly dynamic configuration where older forms of author-ity may struggle and succeed in reimposing themselves.9

The conditions that today mark the possibility of citiesas strategic sites are basically two, and both capture majortransformations that are destabilizing older systems orga-nizing territory and politics, as briefly discussed in the firsthalf of the chapter. One of these is the re-scaling of whatare the strategic territories that articulate the new polit-ico-economic system. The other is the partial unbundlingor at least weakening of the national as container of socialprocess due to the variety of dynamics encompassed by

7 Furthermore, in my reading, particular institutions of the state also are suchstrategic sites even as there is an overall shrinking of state authority throughderegulation and privatisation.

8 Much of Weber’s examination focuses on the gradual emergence and structuringof the force-composition of the city in various areas under different conditions and itsgradual stabilization into a distinct form. He traces the changing composition offorces from the ancient kingships through the patrician city to the demos of theancient world, from the episcopal structures and fortresses through the city ofnotables, to the guild dominated cities in Europe. He is always trying to lay bare thecomplex processes accompanying the emergence of urban community which forWeber is akin to what today we might describe in terms of governance andcitizenship.

9 Cf. his examination of how these types of changes and innovations derive from hiskey concepts, or categories for analysis: social actions, social relations, and socialinstitutions – all critical to his theory of the urban community.

S. Sassen / City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 3–11 9

globalization and digitization.10 The consequences for citiesof these two conditions are many: what matters here is thatcities emerge as strategic sites for major economic processesand for new types of political actors. More generally onecould posit that insofar as citizenship is embedded and inturn marked by its embeddedness (Sassen, 2008: chap. 6),these new conditions may well signal the possibility ofnew forms of citizenship practices and identities.11

What is being engendered today in terms of politicalpractices in the global city is quite different from what itmight have been in the medieval city of Weber. In themedieval city we see a set of practices that allowed the bur-ghers to set up systems for owning and protecting propertyand to implement various immunities against despots of allsorts.12 Today’s political practices, I would argue have to dowith the production of ‘‘presence” by those without powerand with a politics that claims rights to the city rather thanprotection of property.13 What the two situations share isthe notion that through these practices new forms of politi-cal subjectivity, i.e. citizenship, are being constituted andthat the city is a key site for this type of political work. Thecity is, in turn, partly constituted through these dynamics.Far more so than a peaceful and harmonious suburb, the con-tested city is where the civic is getting built. After the longhistorical phase that saw the ascendance of the nationalstate and the scaling of key economic dynamics at the na-tional level, the city is once again today a scale for strategiceconomic and political dynamics.

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